‘Priapus’ by Pietro Bembo: An Annotated Translation
[The following excerpt is taken from the introduction to Salemi's English translation of the erotic poem “Priapus.” The critic focuses on the lascivious imagery to demonstrate that Bembo was working within an established tradition.]
Of all the literary productions in both Latin and Italian of Pietro Bembo, none is so notorious as the poem “Priapus.” Although by no means as pornographic as some other Renaissance effusions, the imagery of “Priapus” is still offensive enough to repel many readers who might otherwise appreciate the beauty, wit, and craftsmanship of a poem that Fred J. Nichols has called “by far the most elegant accomplishment of Renaissance Latin in this particular area of literary endeavor.”1
A scion of the Venetian nobility, Pietro Bembo was an outstanding—as well as protean—figure of Renaissance Italian history. Courtier, diplomat, scholar, historiographer, papal secretary, editor of Petrarch, suitor to Lucrezia Borgia, a prolific poet in Italian and finally a Cardinal of the Church, Bembo epitomized the wide-ranging scope of interest and activity associated with Renaissance humanism. His dialogues Gli Asolani reflect the fashionable neo-Platonism of its philosophy, his history of Venice its obsession with Ciceronian Latin, his vast body of sonnets and stanze its revitalized Petrarchism, his Prose della volgar lingua its growing taste for vernacular literature. In his Latin poetry too, Bembo was one with his contemporaries in the desire to create serious verse based on ancient models, purely classical in its vocabulary and style. And “Priapus” is a fine example of that “consummate literary skill” which Nichols has described as a particular mark of Bembo's Latin poems.2
“Priapus” first appeared in the posthumous edition of Bembo's Latin poetry published at Venice in 1552-53.3 It is difficult to determine exactly when in Bembo's life the poem was written, but it is more likely a youthful composition than a product of his later years. A note in a MS of “Priapus” and some other poems by Bembo states that he wrote it “when he was a youth” (dum erat iuvenis), and adds that such obscene matters were hardly fitting to the gravity and dignity of old age.4 The subject of “Priapus” is a certain “herb” or “plant” in a garden, and the manifold virtues that this herb holds for women. As the poem progresses the imagery makes it unmistakably clear that the herb is the “little mint” (mentula) or penis, although not a single offensive term is used in the eighty-odd lines that make up the poem. “Priapus” is a marvelous evocation of sensuality, but one whose verbal duplicity insists on defending itself, as it were, by saying to the shocked reader honi soit qui mal y pense—evil to him who evil thinks.
Bembo's poem must be understood within the context of the Priapean corpus, an Augustan collection of about eighty short poems, mostly obscene, pertaining to the god Priapus.5 Originally an important god of fertility, by late Roman times Priapus had become a minor divinity relegated to the garden.6 His statue was that of an ugly, satyr-like creature with a prominent erection usually painted a menacing red. This statue of Priapus functioned as a scarecrow, and by extension came to be looked upon as a guardian posted against thieves who might enter the garden to steal fruits. Many of the poems in the Priapean corpus are warnings to would-be pilferers, and sometimes they threaten very explicit sexual punishment.7 Some are epigrammatic, others longer, and almost all are concerned with the phallus in some way or another. Because of its unabashed vocabulary and licentious subject-matter, the Priapean corpus led a subterranean existence in the world of letters, and Renaissance editors balked at publishing the collection as the work of Vergil, who is almost unanimously named as the author in the MS tradition. Instead, the poems were attributed to “diverse authors,” as indeed is probably the case.8
A good many of the poems in the Priapean corpus are spoken by Priapus in soliloquy or to others, while a few are addressed to the god by some third party. In the first case, a Renaissance editor would entitle the poem “Priapus,” while in the second case the poem would be headed “Ad Priapum.”9 This minor point makes it clear that Bembo's poem has the god as its speaking persona, and not Bembo or even his poetically imagined self. One must not think of “Priapus” as a reflection of turpitude in its author—the poem is a feigned bit of oblique eroticism that works within an established tradition of such verse.
In several places in his poem Bembo is either alluding to verses in the Priapean corpus, or unconsciously remembering them. Thus the lines
Tum mirata novam faciem non rustica virgo
Praegrandesque toros, insolitumque decus,
which describe how a girl is amazed when the “plant” gets larger, seem to recall a reference in Priapea 68 to Nausicaa and Odysseus:
Huius et Alcinoi mirata est filia membrum
Frondenti ramo vix potuisse tegi.
(And the daughter of Alcinous was astonished that this man's member was hardly able to be covered with a leafy bough.)
Similarly, when in Bembo's poem a girl addresses the plant with the words Te meum columen, te mea sceptra puto, we are reminded of Priapea 25, which speaks of
Sceptrum, quod pathicae petunt puellae.
(The scepter that pliant girls strive for.)
Also, when Bembo writes In molli latet umbra aliis, mihi semper aperta est he recalls a commonplace theme of the Priapean corpus, as in Priapea 9:
Nec mihi sit crimen, quod mentula semper aperta est:
Hoc mihi si telum desit, inermis ero.
(Let me not be blamed if my mentula is always in the open—if I lack this weapon I'll be unarmed.)
Even lines 47 to 50—the most vividly sensual of Priapus—recall poem 48 of the Priapean corpus:
Quod partem madidam mei videtis,
Per quam significor Priapus esse:
Non ros est, mihi crede, non pruina,
Sed quod sponte sua solet remitti,
Cum mens est pathicae memor puellae.
(The wet part of me which you see—the part that shows me to be Priapus—is wet from neither dew nor hoar-frost, believe me, but from that which is accustomed to be yielded up of its own free will when the mind recalls a pliant girl.)
The very conception of the mentula as a herb is not original with Bembo, but is anticipated in Priapea 68, where the organ is likened to the mythic herb moly (μῶλυ):
Hic legitur radix, de qua flos aureus exit;
Quem cum μῶλυ vocat, mentula μῶλυ fuit.
(Here the root is plucked, out of which comes a golden flower. That which he calls moly was the mentula.)
There are other poems in the Priapean corpus which cast light on Bembo's work. Priapea 51 is especially notable since, like “Priapus,” it contains a list of plants in a garden. But although that poem may have been the primary inspiration for Bembo, the entire collection should be examined to see the tradition which gave birth to “Priapus.”10
Even if we did not place “Priapus” within this poetic tradition, the language that makes up the poem's seemingly innocuous beginning hints of the lascivious tone of the later parts. The verbs allicit and rapiunt in lines 2 and 3 have sexual overtones, and the picking of flowers is itself no accident of fiction. Flowers are picked for several traditional reasons, and the poem dutifully lists them: to make garlands, to decorate the hair, to honor the gods, or simply for their beauty and fragrance. But to understand why Bembo uses this image we must recall what the phrase carpere flores means in the amatory tradition. In the Metamorphoses, after losing Eurydice the disappointed Orpheus gives up the love of women:
Ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem
In teneros transferre mares citraque iuventam
Aetatis breve ver et primos carpere flores.
(He was the originator among the Thracian people of that practice which transfers love to tender boys, and picks the first flowers and brief spring of their youthful years.)
(Metamorph. X. 83-85)11
This plucking or picking of flowers is clearly sexual, and in fact the meaning is standard in much medieval poetry.12 Bembo begins “Priapus” with an innocence that is only apparent—the careful reader notes immediately the lascivious potential of the imagery. The poet then goes through a short catalogue of plants and flowers, a list which seems to do no more than tell us what the “special flower” is not.
But in fact this is not all the catalogue does. Bembo's use of floral imagery goes beyond the mere cumulative amplification of a poetic list. Almost every one of the plants which he mentions in lines 9 to 16 shares, reflects, or suggests some quality of the phallus in terms of the poem's ultimate development. Thus the “unwithering” or “undying” plant (amaranthus) is an image of the perpetual erection of Priapus, and the sorrel is slippery (lubricum), as is the Priapic member later on in the poem. Like the all-heal (panacea), the phallus is good for many ailments, and like the poppy it is an excellent soporific. Like the self-turning heliotrope, it moves vigorously, and like the acanthus, it rises up. Even the artichoke (cynara) on its long stem appears phallic. But it is the poem's oblique reference to the hyacinth that demonstrates Bembo's skillful use of an erudite allusion to enhance this Priapic theme. The story of the dying Hyacinth in Ovid depends heavily on floral imagery, which Bembo is certainly remembering:
Ut, siquis violas riguoque papaver in horto
Liliaque infringat fulvis horrentia linguis,
Marcida demittant subito caput illa gravatum
Nec se sustineant spectentque cacumine terram,
Sic vultus moriens iacet, et defecta vigore
Ipsa sibi est oneri cervix umeroque recumbit.
(Just as if someone in a well-watered garden should snap off violets or the poppy or lilies bristling with yellow tongues, those drooping flowers would quickly let down their heavy heads, gazing downward to the earth, unable to sustain themselves, so does his dying face hang down, deprived of strength, and his neck is a burden to itself and sinks down on his shoulder.)
(Metamorph. X. 190-95)
This image of drooping languor and weakness in picked flowers is in sharp contrast to the vigor and vitality of the phallic flower, a flower which is made even stronger and taller by being “plucked.” Bembo's hyacinth (the flower which “has its name from a boy”) is the reverse image of that other masculine flower—the mentula—which in the case of Priapus never grows languid. The plant which this poem speaks of is far different (longe alia est) from every other plant, while encompassing all of their individual virtues.
There is a final joke on the reader in the last two lines of the poem, where Priapus asks forgiveness for having “slipped in one word.” At first one assumes that this apology is for the semi-explicitness of menta pusilla. But in fact it is for the word nimia (“excessive”) as applied to the phallus. In a poem that contains—unlike many of its Priapean forebears—not a single offensive term or gross description, the facetious apology is an apposite touch. It serves as an appropriate signature to a poem that truly transcends its genre in subtlety, delicacy, grace, and wit.
Notes
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Fred J. Nichols, An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 29.
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Nichols, p. 51.
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A meticulous chronology of editions and MSS of all Bembo's poems is contained in Marco Pecoraro's Per la Storia dei Carmi del Bembo (Venezia-Roma: Instituto Per La Collaborazione Culturale, 1959). See pp. 51-52 for the dating of this particular edition.
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Modena, cod. T. 6. 8. The note goes on to mention that Bembo wrote the poems in the twenty-fifth year of his age (anno aetatis suae vigesimo quinto). See Pecoraro, p. 83.
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A convenient edition is Grattius Faliscus/“Priapeorum” Poetae (Pisa: Giardini Editori, 1976). All my subsequent quotations from the Priapean corpus are from this text, pp. 41-67.
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See R. P. Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786; repr. Secaucus, N.J.: University Books, 1974), p. 102.
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Cf. poems 22 and 35 in the corpus.
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See R. F. Thomason, The Priapea and Ovid: A Study of the Language of the Poems (Nashville, Tenn.: George Peabody College, 1931), pp. 3-10, for a good account of the history of the Priapean corpus, but one which argues Ovid to be the sole author of the collection.
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This is the case in the 1517 Aldine edition of the Priapean corpus mentioned later in this article.
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Poems to or about Priapus were composed by a number of ancient writers. Martial wrote several, but especially notable are Tibullus I. 4, and the eighth poem in Horace's first book of Satires.
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Quotations from Ovid are from William S. Anderson's edition of Metamorphoses Books 6-10 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), pp. 130-33.
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The most famous example is the extended metaphor of the Roman de la Rose, but the image also appears in the Carmina Burana in poems such as “Amor Habet Superos” (Hilka-Schumann, 88) and “Prata iam rident omnia” (Hilka-Schumann, 114). The first can be found in George Whicher's The Goliard Poets (Cambridge, Mass.: The University Press, 1949), p. 166, and the second in Helen Waddell's Medieval Latin Lyrics (London: Constable, 1966), p. 250.
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